Results tagged “rooseveltislandoperatingcorporation”

The residents of Roosevelt Island are a couple weeks closer to getting their tram back. That is, if they want it. The tram, which had two cars stuck for basically half a day with 68 people in them back in April, was tested yesterday and went well. The tram has been out of service since the April 18th stuckage-suckage, and the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation put $500,000 into upgrading machines and tested evacuation plans. That sounds great - we're assuming that they fixed the backup and the second backup systems, which were both busted.

Those poor residents of Roosevelt Island. The Roosevelt Island Tram, which was stuck for half a day with 68 people in two cars, has been out of service for almost a month while various agencies investigated the problems. For a while, the tram wouldn't move, but recently tram has been working on 400 test runs, thanks to a new electrical power source. But the tram still needs to be inspected by the Department of Labor (plus finish working on its backup power plans) before it can start running again with people in them.

With all of the passengers of the Roosevelt Island tram stoppage safely on land, officials are trying to get to the bottom of what happened. It turns out the rescue schemes - the crane and the cade - were improvised in the middle of the night, since the backup system did work nor did the second backup system work (the second electrical backup was busted because it failed an inspection over a year ago and was never fixed - why have redundancies when you're transporting people?). The president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which manages the island and tramway, Herbert Berman, said that a power surge had disrupted the main system; Con Ed didn't have an reports of a surge (and why would a surge only effect the tram and not other businesses). so perhaps it was an internal surge? Mayor Bloomberg promised an investigation and praised the emergency responders, though there's some question why the police took the lead when the fire department has more experience in this area (one idea: the Mayor LOVES Commissioner Kelly). While there is much public bickering, we have to hand it to the passengers for being good-natured, if freaked out, about everything. We doubt we would have been that strong!

A bunch of people have written in to ask if the Roosevelt Island Tram is running. The answer is yes-- it is not operated by the MTA (it's run by JWP and overseen by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation.) Some tram info:

Roosevelt Island, pop. 10,000, is in the news again. The small town in the middle of the big city, one of the great urban planning "eh-steps" (not quite a misstep, but close), was last seen in the news scaring Jennifer Connely in "Dark Water." But now its got a political scandal, or the makings of one, to call its very own.